Graphics Cards Guide

Really Budget Evergreen Arrives

Really Budget Evergreen Arrives

Just weeks ago, ATI launched their Radeon HD 5450 and HD 5570 chips, marking the completion of the Evergreen product line-up. With the release of the two chips, ATI has now a full range of Evergreen graphics cards, from high-end to budget-class, out in the market. This is impressive considering that the first Evergreen card - the Radeon HD 5870 - was launched slightly more than five months ago.

Anyhow, today we are going to take a look at both the Radeon HD 5450 and HD 5570. These cards are budget-classed cards, priced well below US$100, and are targeted at HTPC enthusiasts, casual users with multimedia needs and light gamers. It's main competition in this arena will be NVIDIA's GeForce GT 240, GT 220 and 210, and also previous generation budget Radeon cards.

We begin our analysis with the Radeon HD 5450, which is powered by ATI's Cedar PRO chip. This chip is the absolute base model in the Evergreen family and it has only 80 stream processors, 8 texture mapping units and 4 raster operating units - a far cry from the might of the all-powerful Cypress XT chip, which has 1600 stream processors.

In stock form, it's clocked at 650MHz at the core, and can be paired to run with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory (but more likely the latter). It's really basic, but the most worrying bit is its narrow 64-bit memory bus, which could seriously hamper performance. This however is quite a norm for very entry-level class cards and this model shows it. On the upside however, rated TDP at load is a mere 19.1W, which points to it as being extremely energy efficient and that it can be passively cooled.

The Radeon HD 5570 is markedly more robust. Powered by the Redwood PRO chip, it gets 400 stream processors, 20 texture mapping units and 8 raster operating units - the same as the Radeon HD 5670, which we were quite pleased with. However, clock speeds are severely different as the core clock has been numbed down to 650MHz (as compared to 750MHz on the Radeon HD 5670). The Radeon HD 5570 also retains the HD 5670's 128-bit wide bus width, but employs DDR3 memory instead, with ATI's reference editions clocking at 1800MHz DDR. Considering the Radeon HD 5570's paper specifications alone, we think it should still remain quite competitive.

And of course, both these new chips support all the niceties that we've come to expect from an Evergreen card, and that is full DirectX 11 compatibility and ATI EyeFinity. DirectX 11 compatibility might be a moot point for such low-end cards, but they should have no problems driving up to three monitors simultaneously. To add, both SKUs will have cards that come in both 512MB and 1GB flavors.